Mastercard's brief U.K. outage echoes Visa's June incident

About a month after Visa's European outage, Mastercard encountered a similar glitch for a brief period of time on Thursday.

Some Mastercard transactions did not work for about 90 minutes, reports The Sun and Revolut, which instructed consumers to use other payment methods. Digital payments company Monzo reported the outage was resolved as of Thursday evening, which Mastercard later confirmed.

Mastercard did not disclose the cause or size of of its outage, though it appears to have been smaller in scope and duration than Visa's outage, a 10-hour incident that spanned Europe.

Visa's outage prompted pressure from politicians for more transparency, in part due to the vagueness of the network's initial explanation that it suffered a hardware failure. The card network later attributed the outage to a failure in its European processing system, a shortfall that should be avoided when Visa migrates to its global processing system later this year.

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